2016년 1월 12일 화요일

Toast to Starman, Good Bye to Major Tom

Ten days into the new year, the unexpected, gripping news of David Bowie's death makes my heart jump. It's been over four years since I smoked my last cigarette. Shouldn't times like this be an exception, I wonder. I do resist the temptation to smoke one in his honor, but it isn't easy, as the first lines of "Rock-n-roll Suicide" echo in my head: "Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth..."Just a couple of days ago there was much talk about his music. Was it because he was already dead, then? But no, he had released new music then, on his 69th birthday on January 8. Only two days later, he is said to have died "peacefully after a courageous 18-month battle against cancer." I hadn't known of that battle at all. These facts I cannot instantly register. It seems strange that such an unearthly thing, too, submits to the mundane--terrifyingly absolute and final, yet much too inevitable as to be mundane--human fate of death. And cancer, no less. Now that I look again at the few recent photos published in news media, they show faint yet unmistakable signs of illness, marks of chemo. It is heartbreaking to imagine this unearthly man undergoing the process too familiar to me. It may be ridiculous to be mourning a pop culture icon, but I find myself reeling with a visceral sense of loss. This loss feels more personal than is reasonable. I do not want to be seeing all the obits and headlines that pop up everywhere on the internet. Nonetheless, I see, post after post, an endless stream of tributes and memories on Facebook, even from friends who tend to be indifferent to celeb culture. The shared grief is comforting, though--this unbelieving sadness shared among so many of my generation. All of us‪#‎DavidBowie‬‬mourners must have reasons why we are so personally affected.

Mark Ruffalo mourned him as "Father of all us freaks." Indeed.

I was quietly but absolutely fascinated with him throughout my adolescence, which was spent under the oppressive mandates of gender normativity and textbook uniformity. Living in a culture that gave me no language with which to describe what Bowie was doing, I didn't even knowhow to verbalize that fascination. Watching him play and perform, I learned that being weird, abnormal, and transgressive could be all right, fun, and even necessary at times; that a different form of beauty might be born of conscious defiance of received notions of beauty; that gender could be also liberating (as opposed to regulatory) in its fluidity. No writer or teacher I had access to at the time could teach me such things. He was the love of my namelessly deviant and wordlessly discontented youth. His varying phases of self-invention and his invariably exquisite vampiric beauty definitely affected my preferences in certain things. I happily hold him accountable for at least a small portion of what I am--an incorrigible if inconspicuous queer spinster freak.

As I got older, I also grew to appreciate his music and the incredibly sophisticated lyrics much better. Even now I cannot get tired of listening to "Rock-n-roll Suicide," "Life of Mars?" and "Absolute Beginners," when driving. Most of my past relationships were with the persons who shared or at least understood this special significance he has for me. Any one of them would have been willing, if possible, to have a drink with me on the day he died; one or two of them might really have thought of me when they heard the news, I'd like to think. That the boy who had given me the Bowie at the Beeb CDs a few years before died only about a year ago makes all this the more poignant. The year 2015 was ushered in with the shocking news of GD's untimely death; 2016 will be lived in wake of the death of Bowie himself.

Getting older, one cannot avoid these accruing deaths. These losses, however, add up to make me increasingly aware that dying IS something that one needs not be afraid, that death is not far away and is what life transitions into. When my mother died, I learned that dying really was how one ends living. Death seemed a state into which one disappears naturally, and despite the shock and grief inherent in bereavement, this discovery was more reassuring than could be explained in words. Bowie's death now invokes a similar feeling. He also makes me realize once again how I would like to face death, especially because it is obvious that he transitioned into death doing until the very last what he had been doing all his life. His last album "Blackstar" must have been a parting gift, which turns even his death into art with a reference to the tumor.

Many others seem to feel Bowie's death is surreal. Because what he did is immortal, we tend to have thought that he too was immortal. What a life to have touched so many. I will always be sad about his passing, a corner of my heart will always crumble and melt freshly every time I remember that he's now gone from this world. Instead of mourning, though, perhaps a toast is in order for the Starman, who has now become the Wide-Eyed Boy in Free Cloud.